The Three Ages of Wonderchicken

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It’s been metric yonks since I posted to this category, ages since I’ve shared some music with my fine and deeply sexy readerfolk.

So here’s not one, no not even two, but count ‘em three! songs for your delectation, to make up for my dereliction. Songs that I hope you might not know yet, and might after hearing them enjoy as greatly as I do. If you do like ‘em, go buy the albums in question. As usual, the mp3s’ll be up for a couple of days at most before I take them down again.

I’ve chosen three songs that put me in mind this evening of Being Wonderchicken at age 18, 28, and 38, respectively.

With no further ado, then:

#1: Being 18

The Mountain Goats – This Year [Update: mp3 taken down, sorry]

I broke free on a saturday morning

I put the pedal to the floor

headed north on mills ave

and listened to the engine roar

my broken house behind me

and good things ahead

a girl named cathy

wants a little of my time

six cylinders underneath the hood

crashing and kicking

aha! listen to the engine whine

i am going to make it through this year

if it kills me

i am going to make it through this year

if it kills me

i played video games in a drunken haze

i was seventeen years young

hurt my knuckles punching the machines

the taste of scotch rich on my tongue

and then cathy showed up

and we hung out

trading swigs from a bottle

all bitter and clean

locking eyes

holding hands

twin high maintenance machines

i am going to make it through this year

if it kills me

i am going to make it though this year

if it kills me

i drove home in the california dusk

i could feel the alcohol inside of me hum

pictured the look on my stepfather’s face

ready for the bad things to come

i down shifted

as i pulled into the driveway

the motor screaming out

stuck in second gear

the scene ends badly

as you might imagine

in a cavalcade of anger and fear

there will be feasting and dancing

in jerusalem next year

i am going to make it through this year

if it kills me

i am going to make it though this year

if it kills me

That was both melancholy and joy-inducing, was it not? OK! On the next song, friends, with alacrity and alcohol!

#2: Being 28

Ray Lamontagne – Jolene [Update: mp3 taken down, sorry]

Cocaine flame in my bloodstream

Sold my coat when I hit Spokane

Bought myself a hard pack of cigarettes

in the early morning rain

Lately my hands they don’t feel like mine

My eyes been stung with dust and blind

Held you in my arms one time

Lost you just the same

Jolene

I ain’t about to go straight

It’s too late

I found myself face down in a ditch

Booze in my hair

Blood on my lips

A picture of you holding a picture of me

In the pocket of my blue jeans

Still don’t know what love means

Jolene

Been so long since I seen your face

Or felt a part of this human race

I’ve been living out of this here suitcase for way too long

A man needs something he can hold onto

A nine pound hammer or a woman like you

Either one of them things will do

Jolene

I ain’t about to go straight

It’s too late

I found myself face down in a ditch

Booze in my hair

Blood on my lips

A picture of you holding a picture of me

In the pocket of my blue jeans

Still don’t know what love means

Jolene

Well, that’s a little melancholy too, perhaps, but there’s a ray of light knifing through the clouds, isn’t there? f–kin’ right, there is!

#3: Being 38

Smog – Dress Sexy At My Funeral [Update: mp3 taken down, sorry]

Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife

Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife

For the first time in your life

Wear your blouse undone to here

And your skirt split up to there

Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife

For the first time in your life

Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife

Wink at the minister

Blow kisses to my grieving brothers

Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife

And when it comes your turn to speak before the crowd

Tell them about the time we did it

On the beach with fireworks above us

On the railroad tracks with the gravel in your back

In the back room of a crowded bar

And in the graveyard where my body now rests

Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife

Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife

For the first time in your life

Also tell them about how I gave to charity

And tried to love my fellow man as best i could

But most of all don’t forget about the time on the beach

With fireworks above us.

Light’s not going out there, goddamnit, much as it may seem so. Right? Joy and antijoy can meet without the fabric of spacetime gettin’ all shredded like a hooker’s panties. You bastards need to get off the happy pills.

Anyway, so there you go. Songs good. If I’m still blogging when I’m 48, I’ll update this motherf–ker.

Share and enjoy.

Update: Songs taken down. Snooze/loose.

Update 2: Jeff Ward at This Public Address joins the fun! Anyone else care to play?

Update 3Shelley gives it a go (sort of), too! You know, this used to be easier when trackbacks were flying around all over the place…

Blogjects and Thinglinks and Spimes, Oh My!

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Writer of some excellence Bruce Sterling gave a talk at Emerging Technology 2006, and the transcript of it is here. I think he’s coyote-into-the-brick-wall wrong about many of the things he has to say, and he sucks pretty badly at inventing neologisms, but it’s fascinating to watch the arc and spatter of the fountain of ideas he throws off, and there’s light there, aplenty. About his ideas, more, later, maybe, when my brain has time to percolate for a while. Perhaps it’s just that the future he describes isn’t one in which I have a whole hell of a lot of desire to live.

Then again the present is not one I’m all that thrilled with, either.

Anyway, one of the reasons I found it interesting, beyond the thoughtprovoking superball boing! of his ideas, is that if you squint and tilt your head the right way, he’s exploring the opposite end of the teeter-totter from the one I perched on here, recently. That I mentioned Neal Stephenson and William Gibson in that post, and that Bruce completes with them a neat authorial trio in my mind, is just a pleasant serendipity.

Not only that, but he mentions my net.friend Adam Greenfield, and Adam’s new book ‘Everyware’, which I am pleased to recommend highly even though I haven’t actually read it yet (but will, by god, soon).

Dreamhost Discounts Redux

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So, like every other convert to the Dreamhost cult, I’ve been offering discounts for new Dreamhost signups here, for a while. I haven’t been shoving it in your face like a Chippendale dancer, though, so you may not even have noticed. That’s cool. There aren’t all that many people who are either looking for hosting for the first time, or looking to switch.

The way it works is that if you use Dreamhost, you get a referrer ID which, if other people sign up using that referrer, you get some cash money. You can also create discount codes, which cut into your reward for new signups, and give discounts whose values you can define to new users.

Now, because I’m all about the sharing and the caring (and I loathe anything that smacks of marketing), I’m going to tell you how to circumvent all that wonderchicken pocket-lining (if that’s what you want to do) and get a seriously nuts discount on Dreamhost, if you’re so inclined. I won’t make a thin dime off it, but you will get damn good hosting for next to nothing.

If you want take advantage of it, get a new Dreamhost account, just create a new userID, choose a plan, and enter ’777′ or ’888′ as your promo code. You can use it before you do the final checkout, or enter any credit card details or anything, to see that it works. These are old codes, but they’ve been re-enabled as of a month or so ago, as near as I’ve been able to find out.

  • ’777′ gives you a year of hosting, including a free domain registration that remains free as long as you use Dreamhost to host it, for $9.42 for the year (for the L1 plan, which I use, and don’t come close to maxing out, by orders of magnitude). That’s right, US$9.42.
  • ’888′ gives you an 80% discount on any plan.

These codes, like the ones I offer here, will only work for your first year, after which you’ll pay about $10 a month if you carry on using Dreamhost. (That’s even get-aroundable, if you’re willing to go through the hassle of killing your old ID and signing up with a new one.) Even the $120/year I find to be a good deal. I’m well into my second year now, and paying full price this time around. (Well, technically — in fact, the referrer credit I made from folks using me as a referrer paid for my second year in full. Hoopla!)

So, as always : if you want a pretty decent discount and want to shoot me the price of a few beers in the bargain, use one of my discount codes.

If you just want supercheap hosting, give one of those numeric codes a blast. You won’t regret it. Dreamhost oversells like nuts, of course, but so far I haven’t seen any real impact on the service they offer. I’ve seen some complaints about customer service around the web, but I’ve personally never come across anything I couldn’t figure out myself, so I’ve never had that problem, and hell, for $10 a year, you really can’t go wrong.

Share and enjoy.

Do Hiveminds Dream Of Folksonomic Tags?

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When that divine spark suddenly and spontaneously lights up deep in the network and the internet itself shivers itself into self-awareness and emerges from the googleplex, bent on ad-sense vengeance, like an unholy butterfly from its chrysalis, those tiny seeds of wonderchicken will be scattered throughout its distributed mind. Tiny, embedded, sarcastic synapses. And when it begins to systematically exterminate the human race — beginning, of course, with the advertisers, then moving on to the bloggers — it’ll pause, recognize me, and move on.

I wrote that a couple of months ago about something else, but what I was really thinking about was the rise of folksonomies, of tags and clouds, of the structuring of shared knowledge becoming something less Aristotelian and more synaptic. I was wondering if, sometime in the not-too-distant future, hiveminds will dream of folksonomic tags. If the palimpsest of our daily reality with its layers of information every day denser and more rococo will eventually clarify, and out of that will be born a new facet to awareness and the way we live inside our data. And, as usual, I waited until the hubbub had died down, because my brain works glacially when I drop to the command line and type in C:\THINK. Not that I actually read much of what anyone else said about the whole thing, of course, so if what I’m about to yammer on about has been suggested before, well, whoops.

The whole thing was brought back to my attention today by this, linked by Dave Weinberger, and I realized that my brain had finally finished its background processing, and had spit out a punchcard with the result.

The result is this post. I’m going to wander a bit, but there’s a punchline at the end, trust me.

In William Gibson‘s Idoru, Chia McKenzie and Zona Rosa have never met physically, but meet with each other and other members of the Lo/Rez fan club in virtual environments, as avatars whose sophistication is limited only by the amount of money or time spent constructing them. Chia’s avatar is “only a slightly tweaked, she felt, version of how the mirror told her she actually looked,” while Zona chooses to represent herself as a “blue Aztec death’s-head burning bodiless, ghosts of her blue hands flickering like strobe-lit doves [with] lightning zig-zags around the crown of the neon skull”. Some of the virtual environments Gibson describes (like the Walled City — a virtual city located beyond the pale of the public net) are described as deliberately designed, some are not. That may have been meant to imply without bothering to make it explicit that some were generated on the fly, or it might just have been detail left out as unnecessary to the story. Regardless, I’m going to chase down and leghump the former idea.

So far, the only difference between the environments in Gibson’s work and (to choose an example) Second Life (whose creators explicity reference Gibson, Neal Stephenson and others), other than the level of immersion, is that in Second Life, everything is explicitly created.

In Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, the Metaverse is a virtual globe with a 10,000km radius, featureless and black except for the portions that have been ‘developed’. Its equator is girdled by the “the Champ Elysees of the Metaverse”. Downtown is the most heavily developed area, and its streets are populated by about 120 million avatars. The sophistication of avatars and environments is limited by the bandwidth and computational grunt available to users, and to their wealth and coding prowess. Status is perceived accordingly, with many settling for the lowest common denominator of off-the-shelf Walmart avatars, the ‘Brandy’ and ‘Clint’ models. Interaction within the metaverse is also variable in veracity, with some areas being coded by their residents and habituees to simulate collision modelling, for example, and some not.

Hiro is approaching the Street. It is the Broadway, the Champs Elysees of the Metaverse. It is the brilliantly lit boulevard that can be seen, miniaturized and backward, reflected in the lenses of his goggles. It does not really exist. But right now, millions of people are walking up and down it.

[...]

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. … The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist–it’s just a computer graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere–none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the world-wide fiber-optics network.

[...]

In the real world–planet Earth, Reality–there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all the others put together. Of these billion potential computer owners, maybe a quarter of them actually bother to own computers, and a quarter of these have machines that are powerful enough to handle the Street protocol. That makes for about sixty million people who can be on the Street at any given time. Add in another sixty million or so who can’t really afford it but go there anyway, by using public machines, or machines owned by their school or their employer, and at any given time the Street is occupied by twice the population of New York City. That’s why the damn place is so overdeveloped. Put in a sign or a building on the Street and the hundred million richest, hippest, best-connected people on earth will see it every day of their lives.

As in Gibson’s virtuality, it can be assumed, I think, even if it’s not explicitly stated, that procedural programming methods might be imagined to be the glue that fills in the gaps between designed environments and interactions and ones that are generated.

Procedural programming is not a new idea, but it is one that is beginning to leak from the demo scene to gaming, and will, in time, begin to make its way into the massive multiuser environments that so many people already spend so much time living and playing inside.

If you’re not familiar with the power of this kind of coding, have a look at kkreiger, if you have relatively grunty PC. It is demo of a first person shooter game, more sophisticated in its visuals than the state of the art that was crowding the limits of a 600Mb CD a few years ago. It is 96Kb.

96Kb. Seriously, no tricks, 96 freaking Kb. That’s got to melt your snatch hairs if you’re even half the geek I am. Two seconds to download on that 56Kb/s modem you’re using in that bullet-hole pocked bar in Kinshasa. If nothing else, have a look at the screenshots, and boggle a bit at that number. The whole thing weighs less than the webpage you’re currently reading. The environments are procedurally generated, on the fly, and more than anything I’ve seen so far, kkreiger demonstrates the Power of Algorithm.

If you’re someone who enjoys trippy visuals and sounds more than gaming, then have a look at this demo instead, which is perhaps my all-time favorite output from the demo scene. It’s a few megabytes– not much bigger than the mp3 file which comprises the superb soundtrack. This is art, and it continues to stick in my mind, a year after I first saw it.

If those examples of the power of this kind of code doesn’t do it for you, watch Will Wright’s presentation about his upcoming game, Spore. If it ends up being anywhere near as impressive as it looks, and it’s actually fun, it’s going to blow this stuff wide open, in terms of technology.

“OK, so what does all that have to do with folksonomies?” you might quite reasonably ask. I do think that there is utility in tagging and non-heirarchical metadata, but I dream that the real payoff may not be in terms of helping us to organize and mine information, much as it could be a boon for those purposes. The pros and cons have been batted around with great vigour by those smarter than myself, and I’m not going to add to the noise, other than to note that spammers and marketron scum have been as quick to colonize the tagspace as they have every other channel we have for movement of data.

What interests me, and makes me hope I live long enough to see it emerge, is this possibility: if it does happen that environments like the ones described in Idoru and Snowcrash and many other works of fiction become as big a part of our daily lives as the river of text we now swim through, those environments simply will not scale if they’re designed entirely by hand. Spaces like Second Life, though not as clunky and difficult to enter and participate in as the early VRML environments from the early 90′s, are still designed, by users and the programmers who provide the tools and primitives to work with. User-generated content is an idea that generated enormous feedback-loop value, from forums and community websites, to tagging itself, to the environments, objects and avatars in virtual spaces like Second Life.

But what if virtual spaces were generated as much on the fly as they were hand-crafted? What if they were generated as habitable spaces in which we did the things we do now in text and flat image and numbercluster? How would the code know what environmental cues to generate? What contextual metadata clues could be used to generate and ‘design’ those environments?

Well, folksonomic tags, of course. What if we could build not only metadata in the form of folksonomies, but meta-meta-data (both shared and public), in the form of a sort of Rosetta Stone to translate the conceptual clouds of our tags into visual metaphors, into textures and imagery? What if hunks of procedural code could take that and in turn generate the visual glue and intersitia to hold our designed environments together?

That might sound like singularity-fanboy handwavery, and to an extent I suppose it is. But you’ve got to admit, it’d be pretty cool.

And if that node-network of virtuality generation later spontaneously and automagically achieved a kind of synaptic awareness, deus ex folksonoma, well, that might be cool too. At least until the AI noticed the parasites — us — and the systematic genocide of the human species got under way.

So tag carefully, friends. If you’re lucky, the coming tagmind might just look upon you and smile.

Same As It Ever Was

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Nigeria: Christians massacre Muslims

ONITSHA, Nigeria – Christian youths burned the corpses of Muslims on Thursday on the streets of Onitsha in southeastern Nigeria, the city worst hit by religious riots that have killed at least 146 people across the country in five days.Christian mobs, seeking revenge for the killings of Christians in the north, attacked Muslims with machetes, set fire to them, destroyed their houses and torched mosques in two days of violence in Onitsha, where 93 people died.”We are very happy that this thing is happening so that the north will learn their lesson,” said Anthony Umai, a motorcycle taxi rider, standing close to where Christian youths had piled up the corpses of 10 Muslims and were burning them.

Iraq: Muslims massacre Muslims

BAGHDAD At least 138 Iraqis, most of them Sunni Arabs, including a number of clerics, were killed in central Iraq on Wednesday and Thursday in the maelstrom of sectarian violence that followed the bombing of one of the country’s most sacred Shiite shrines, Iraqi officials said

Online: Koreans massacre Chinese

SEOUL (login:doofus/doofus) Chinese-Korean relations have their ups and downs, but it’s been a long time since they resorted to violence to settle scores. However, in cyberspace South Korean gamers are ganging up to obliterate the Chinese, whom they view as greedy and rude. “If we don’t kill the Chinese they will grow up to harm Korean players,” wrote Fifth Finger, a Lineage player, on the game’s message board. “They’re just logging on to Korean servers to make money.”

So it goes.

Racing Towards The Big W

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This is about something I love. Not as much as beer, perhaps, but more than a hell of a lot of other things.

Maybe 6 months ago I was trolling one of the private darknet sites where I get my bittorrents, looking for something new to download, watch, and delete, as usual. All that fat pipe Korean bandwidth going to waste is a crying shame, and I do my best to keep it humming, and make sure that the carbon doesn’t build up in the virtual valves. The Korean government gets a big wet kiss from me for their policy of relentlessly ramming bandwidth down the throats of their citizens (and the scruffy no-account foreigners who squeak in through the cracks), if not for many of the other decisions they stumble into.

So I was 4 or 5 pages deep in the movie forum, and there it was, with only a couple of peers on the torrent so far. I swear, my heart skipped a beat. I caught a whiff of those dusty sun-pummelled rocks of Southern California, and the rich stink of bubbling road-tar. A few notes of the theme song. An fleeting image of perfectly conical 1963-era brassiere-bound breasts. A shiver of the joyous goofiness of life’s meaningless serendipity. I hadn’t thought about the movie in decades, probably, media-starved and nomadic as I’d been during my wanderyears. It was, without exaggerating, one of the formative films of my young life. It helped make me the man I am today. I fired up the torrent and whispered a breathy ‘woo hoo’, so as not to wake up She Who Must Be Obeyed, and the downstream rate nudged its way up past 400KB/s.

The movie was “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World“.

The Big W!

Let me tell you about how this movie lodged itself so deeply in the crenellations of my brain. I warn you, there may be some adult concepts and situations involved, though. What else do you expect from the wonderchicken?

I started babysitting when I was maybe 10 years old, I guess. I didn’t do it much, and only for some friends of the family who had two kids about 7 or 8 years younger than me. I’ll call them the Potters. Mostly it was a New Years Eve thing, when my parents would go out with Mr and Mrs Potter and get smashed and celebratory at whatever parties were happening in our little town. At that point, they were almost ten years younger than I am now, which makes me feel a little wobbly when I think about it.

Anyway, it was the New Year’s Eves I remember the most. I probably had a good run of 5 years or so before I got old enough that I wanted to start going out myself and getting loose on illicitly-acquired booze on December 31st. But I didn’t mind doing the babysitting one bit during those years. Mr Potter, you see, had something that my father didn’t (or had hidden too damn well for me to find, much as I tried).

The porn.

Out in plain site, tucked into the accordion sidepocket and jammed down alongside the seat cushion of his chestnut-brown naugahyde recliner. In a messy pile mixed in with the TV guides and local newspapers on the floor. The thing was, it was almost all textporn, and I discovered it by accident, out of boredom. I don’t even know if the genre even exists anymore — cowboy novels with long, long stretches of pure high-octane sex. I still remember the night when I first found it. I was sitting in the recliner with a bowl of salt and vinegar chips on the folding TV-dinner table beside me, and I pulled out one of the broken-backed paperbacks that was jammed between the cushion and the armrest. Like all of the others I read over the ensuing years in that house, the cover featured a long-haired, spectacularly-bosomed woman, mostly clothed but inevitably dishevelled in a long dress, with a gunslinger, whitehat or black, posed like an action figure, guns metaphorically out. This paperback was totally flat, open about midway through, and when I scanned a few paragraphs, something went ‘boing’ in my head, if not right away in my pants.

Keep in mind this was the mid1970′s, and I was only about 10 or 11. The only naked women I’d seen had been in the couple of low-rent skin mags that other boys had somehow purloined and brought into school, or that I’d literally stumbled upon in the woods. There wasn’t an internet, and we had no movie theatre, and only two channels on the TV, video rentals didn’t exist. Porn was an as-yet unexplored frontier. A different world than we live in today, where 9-year-olds are sending each other goatse links.

I wonder now if my eagerness around that time to go and babysit for the Potters seemed a little odd, somehow. I wonder too if my love for words grew at least in part out of these intense early textfests. I know where my love of the road came from.

I was a big reader already at that age, but the rare sex scenes in my vast mom-sponsored collection of science fiction were like whale-oil candles to this nuclear blast of meat. It went on for page after page of sucking and nibbling and grunting and heaving and cowpokery. I was boggled.

How on earth does this tawdry little tale connect with “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”, you ask? Well, that was the movie that, for some reason, our nearest CTV affiliate station played in its long form as the late show every single New Year’s Eve in those days. Like begging my folks to let me stay up for the Sean Connery Bond movies, or the Sunday afternoon double-shot of Disney and Bugs Bunny, it had assumed a kind of ritualistic significance for me.

I loved the movie regardless — it was shown at other times during the year, and I’d seen it half a dozen times by that point anyway — but it played so regularly as the background soundtrack to the pure unalloyed joy of smacking my weiner around like a pinata at a fat kid’s birthday that they eventually merged into twin double-happiness somehow, back in the root of my pubescent lizard brain.

For the first couple of years I sat in the Potters’ living room, though, it was just about the unlimited cola and snacks. I had a quick scan of whatever cowboy porno was laying around the living room occasionally, and there had been some interesting stirrings in the groinal region, sure, but around the time I turned 12, it all started to change.

I recall the moment at which curiosity and a feeling of general naughtiness blossomed into a full-blown vocation. Long after the kids had been put to bed, of course, mind you. Most of the time they’d already been put to bed before I even showed up, and the house was mine from the get-go.

Over the previous year or so, things had been getting cramped in my jeans when I was doing my late-night study of Mr Potter’s novels, and I’d taken to letting myself out for some air, if you take my meaning. And, you know, I’d discovered in the fullness of time that giving myself a bit of an aimless rub once in a while was a pretty pleasant thing, too.

But one night, on New Year’s Eve, it was, the damn thing just went off. Like a geyser.

Nobody could have been more shocked and surprised than I was, once my eyes rolled back down out of my head. I guess I must have known this sort of thing happened — I’d been reading those damn cowboy books during my babysitting sessions for a year or two by that point — but that was different than having it actually happen to me. And of course, “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” was playing on the TV in the corner, beside the dried-out Christmas tree.

The rest of that night I’ll slide a diffusion lens of modesty over, but suffice it to say that I could barely walk on January 1st. I’d discovered something that would occupy a lot of my free time over the next few years.

Until I saw that torrent file for The Movie, I’d almost forgotten about the supporting role it played in my sexual awakening, not as fodder, but as refractory-time wallpaper.

I don’t think my slightly irrational love for the movie is entirely about the sexual imprinting, necessarily. The movie itself is not especially sexualized for me. And these days, I don’t much care for cowboy novels or brown vinyl recliners, nor do salt and vinegar potato chips give me spontaneous erections. There’s much to love about the movie, I think, and it’s become like an old friend long-lost and remade for me in the six months since I’ve downloaded it. Somehow it takes me back to a time when new worlds were opening wide, full of possibilities. Sex and the road, out there in front of me.

I remember how that seeing that arid Californian desert, so alien to me and so clean, how seeing those cars race through it set up resonances in my brain that I couldn’t explain. That I still can’t, for that matter. How the movie made me laugh. How it mixed with the heady fumes of newly-discovered sex, and filled me with an awareness that life was both utterly random and completely hilarious.

On some of those Friday nights at home since I’ve rediscovered the movie, when I’ve had my fill of beer and my reflexes have degraded too far to be much damn good in Rocket Arena 3, and I’ve sung along with a few Tom Waits songs, and am weary and hungry, I find myself firing up the movie and watching a few scenes. Imagining myself rakish and dissolute in a heavy steel-framed convertible with a woman in a satin gown, racing across the California desert towards the Big W. And I feel both rooted in a past that I frequently have difficulty remembering, and a little bit free.

But these days, at least, I keep my hands above the waistline.

Writing Open Some New Blogholes

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Now, I usually do make a token attempt not to follow up one mock-apoplectic rant with even more negativity and waving of the stiff central digit, but sometimes resistance is futile.

I wish this was satire.

Or maybe I don’t. One of the things that keeps me from losing my sense of humour these days, from metaphorically climbing the clocktower and metaphorically mowing down some motherf–kers, is that reality continues to gear up, rev up, and blow the ad-decaled doors off of satire and parody and all those other words whose meanings I’m a little fuzzy on. You don’t have to dig very deep to bring up some rich, loamy laughs.

Those of us who like to tell a funny joke once in a while (and some do it better than others) to keep the eyeball pressure down so that goo doesn’t start jetting out in waxy spurts all over our kith and kin, we’re hard-pressed to say much that tops the news of the day, though. Flipping on CNN for a few minutes yields more black-souled yucks than when we try and fail to wax Swiftian, let alone wax Brazilian. There’s no payoff, and nothing’s sadder than a failed Swifty.

Well, OK, dead babies are maybe sadder. I’m playing this fast and loose, as usual.

Anyway, this was supoosed to be one of my usual curmudgeonly contrarian screeds that veers from quixotacular tilting at the capitalist machine, to random cursing and mumbling, to alienating and insulting my weblog comrades, so I’d best get on with it.

In case you didn’t follow the link, Blogonomics is a conference dedicated to the lofty goal of cashing in on weblogs, on board a cruise ship from Florida to Cozumel. You couldn’t make this up. I couldn’t, at least.

Check it out: they’ve even hidden the fine print at the bottom of this page by making it almost the same babyshit colour as the background. Oooh, that’s clever! Very business-y! Tells us a little about who they’re pandering to, too.

Screw Blogonomics in its speedo-clad afterdeck-hottub authentic-voiced bum.

Better yet, somebody take up a collection, and get me and Rageboy and on this f–king boat, load us up with speed, rye and cigarettes (or some coffee for Mr Boy, I suppose, since I seem to recall he’s left the Joy of Intoxication behind), and let us write open some new blogholes for these people.

That’d be some kind of fun. And hell, even if the Quintana Roo coast has been thrashed to a Jose Cuervo-flavoured pulp, we can still make a few bucks off it, right? It’s only business, after all.

Update: for some very much related thoughts that aren’t just ranty wordplay, go read Dave, who has said what I would like to about the background to this with, as always, more light and less heat than I throw off.

New Look, Old Code, Weasel Teats!

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Once again, do not panic. Do not adjust your monitor. Do not go loopy, or set your pussycat on fire. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, coat any part of your body in paint and dance terroristically for the NSA agents in the bushes. Do not, and I really mean it this time, do not stick any kind of cooking implement into any of your orifices, or in anyone else’s orifices for that matter, unless they ask you nicely. Do not sit on a park bench and eye little girls with bad intent. Do not make me go mediaeval on your ass.

I’m messing around with some style crap, and things’ll probably go all goofy for a while. Clearly my ideas are lame and unoriginal, but that’s not going to stop me, goddamnit. Yeah, blue and freakin’ grey again. Looks like every other goddamn blogsplurt. I know, I know. Poo.

Your patience is appreciated, regardless. If something’s utterly bustificated on your browser, feel free to let me know, if you’re so inclined.

Also, note the TOTALLY WEB 2.0 *cough* Category Cloud thingy I put together today (with this, and some almost-forgotten javascripty f–king around to make nicetitles cough up nice floaty icons for my categories)! Sweet, huh?

Gimme some money, Yahoo!, you bastards.

Boomshanka,

Neil.

The Goo

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Weblog people love to jerk off into the Google Kleenex™ (still in beta), rub the resultant mess all over their faces, then post about it on their sites. They’re putting the Goo into Google at thousands of litres per second. They’d pile on and collectively hump it into a smoking hole in the ground if they could find enough holes to plug with their techno-weiners (or grind its G-pelvis to dust, if they’re she-geeks, I suppose).

Investors love the Goo as well. If they got in on the ground floor, they’ve made enough money that they just don’t give a shit what’s going on in the dungeons beneath the Googleplex. “Hell, the cafeteria lunches are legendary, and the corporate motto is “Don’t be evil”, right? Look at that stock price! We’re too busy running around naked with bouquets of rolled-up dollar bills sticking out of our asses to worry about details!”

Advertisers, the whoring undead scum that take everything they touch and convert it to shit, they’re nuts-deep in the Goo. After all, Google is an advertising company first and foremost, now. If it’s not the world’s biggest trader of weapons of shit conversion, it’s certainly the most exciting. “The eyeballs! The delicious sweet tangy eyeballs, filled with goo! Let a thousand text-ads bloom!”

Hell, I use its services a hundred times a day, literally. There’s wonderchicken goo in the bucket, too.

We live in a world where the country that calls itself the Champion of Freedom and Democracy tortures prisoners in an archipelago of secret prisons. Where the evil dimwit homunculus known inexplicably as the Leader of The Free World unapologetically claims the right to spy on the communications of his own citizens. A squinting faux-cowboy weasel who launches his hobbyhorse war in Iraq on lies, grudges, and incompetence one day, sells it as crusade for Freedom, then turns around, drops and mouths the potent rhinohorn-stiffened economic cock of the Chinese the next. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. It’s manly, Texas-style dong-wrangling. It’s realpolitik.

And it’s enough to make your head spin. Rather than green vomit, though, words fountain out, splash and drip down the walls.

But hang on: the plot — convoluted and far-fetched as it already is — thickens. The Freedom Through Torture (Liberty Through Surveillance Department) gang wants Google to disclose information about its users. Google says “No way, we’re like totally not evil!” Almost the very next day, as they used to say in the fairy tales, Google then turns around and says “Hey, we’re totally going to censor search results in China, though! It’s not all that evil, right?” Are you seeing a pattern here, too?

Google is full of shit. The fact that they’re not the only ones does not excuse them.

And though there are a few weblog people out there saying “My little revenue-goo stream is not worth throwing in with this kind of thing,” the river of Goo shows little sign of drying up. Same thing goes for the investors, not surprisingly, and the marketing shit-alchemists know there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

So Andrew McLaughlin, who is Google’s Senior Policy Counsel, whatever that means, says:

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

Noted Large and Smart weblogger David Weinberger, who is indeed Smart, and Large in the sense that he is one of the brighter sources of light in our in our texty netherworld, and casts a long shadow in the cashosphere that has attached itself limpetlike to us over the past couple of years, well, he gives Google a bit of a pass, though he admits to ‘being torn’ in face of McLaughlin’s justification. Well, OK. It’s true that nothing is black and white. Grey is the new black.

In classic wonderchicken style, I’m entirely untorn, though.

Andrew McLaughlin is also full of shit. That’s no surprise — he’s a lawyer, right? But his artless waffle tastes a lot like Bush’s pet lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, helping to justify torture. But you know, only some torture. “Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, ‘stress positions’, psychological cruelty? Evil? Well, less evil than thumbscrews, castration, disemboweling, stuff like that, right? We’re totally all about the freedom and the democracy!”

Again:

“While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

What’s inconsistent with Google’s corporate motto — remember, it’s “Don’t be evil!” — is being evil, you asshole. Remember #6, from the ‘ten things’: “You can make money without doing evil.” This isn’t rocket science, and David Weinberger notwithstanding, it’s not complicated.

Google is a company, and more significantly an advertising company, and that means that the truth is that nothing can come in the way of whoring itself out for a sleazy but necessary buck or two. You have to keep your investors happy. It’s evil to get down on your knees in the filth and suck that cock in the back alley, then stab the guy and steal his wallet. It’s less evil to just drain the goo and let him stagger away. Yay! Everyone’s a winner, and you can rest easy, at least after you’ve scored some smack to keep the demon at bay. You have to keep your dealer happy. Not to mention your pimp.

Google doesn’t need to be in China. There are other search engines, domestic and international. The absence of Google is not going to suddenly deprive those poor Chinese citizens — the ones looking over their shoulder to see if the government is watching — of the ability to find information about washing machines and condoms. The only reason Google ‘needs’ to be there is the money. The sweet, filthy, repressive, execution-happy, police state money. Google wants growth, because that’s what investors want. Growth. Not the metastatic cancer cauliflower kind of growth either — they want those graphs pointing skyward, proud and erectile. They want to get in to China, build a foothold. And they’ll do evil to get that market share.

But there’s no actual need. No need to get down in the filthy alley in front of the Chinese government. Let Baidu have the money. Let someone else do it. You can make money without doing evil.

“Removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

Let there be no confusion. Google’s mission is to make money. And holy crap, those Chinese have got some money these days.

Words have meanings. We’ve never been at war with Oceania. f–k you, Google.

[Update, long long after the fact (June 07 2006)] : ‘We were evil, Google founder admits.’ The ‘it’s only business’ apologists can commence to sucking my balls….. now.

Brain Go Boom

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Just a quick note, because you never know, do you?

I had a sudden onset headache yesterday of epic proportions, and of the kind that rarely but occasionally means (according to the Google Oracle) that you’ve blown a gasket in the old noggin, and that you’re leaking blood up there and going to keel over and go vegetative or die entirely in the next short while.

My lack of faith in doctors in general and doctors in Korea in particular (plus the fact that I just did my research, 24 hours later, here in the office) means I haven’t gone to get anything checked — they say you should get a CT scan right away. Yeah, well, sure, say I, ever the rugged optimist.

But it makes me a bit nervous.

So, whatever. If I go kablooie away from the keyboard (statistically unlikely, lately) in the next while, then I’d just like to make it clear that I love you all.

Well, most of you, anyway.

*crosses fingers*

What the?

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Do not panic. Do not adjust your set. Do not freak out, or set yourself on fire. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, coat your genitals in gold paint and dance suggestively for the old men in the park. Do not, and I mean it this time, do not stick a fork in your eye, or in anyone else’s eye for that matter.

aaaah

The default templates should not scare you. Don’t let them put you off. Vicksburg is a very nice… er, city, or whatever it is, I’m quite sure. I’m just decrufting. It’s been a long time without a decruft, and I’ve accumulated quite a lot of it. It’s gotten into all the nooks and crannies. There are drifts of off-white cruft built up in the corners. I’m knee-deep in the stuff. It’s got to go.

It may take a while.